Deadspin’s 3,880-word epic tale was meticulously researched, masterfully written — and fundamentally flawed.
It’s hard not to write this without sounding like, well, Deadspin. Their posts about everything the mainstream sports journalism complex gets wrong are usually hilarious because they nail it. But Deadspin also tends to wallow in a pit of snarky infallibility — “Look at how badly those guys screwed up, we would never do that!”

Well, as a reporter who is certainly not infallible but who spent a lot of time researching the fascinating history of the Manziel family, I can say one of Deadspin’s main allegations about the Manziels is not only wrong, it erroneously portrays some family members as financial backstabbers, including Johnny Manziel’s great-grandmother who died in 2003.

Deadspin readers have already pointed out one mistake in the story, yet that error and others have gone uncorrected for weeks. That’s not good — especially for a blog known for sniping at others for getting stories wrong.

Deadspin editor Timothy Burke, a talented researcher who helped expose the bombshell that Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te’o’s cancer-stricken girlfriend was actually a hoax who didn’t exist, wrote the story about Manziel’s family. Deadspin posted Burke’s investigation on August 12 and so far it has amassed a whopping 455,000 page views.

Source: Tyler Today Magazine

In fairness to Burke, he got much of the family history right and showed readers how genealogy is anything but boring. Manziel’s great-grandfather, Bobby Joe Sr., was a boxer who sparred with heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey in the 1920s. Bobby Joe retired, moved to East Texas and enjoyed an amazing run of luck as he discovered oil field after oil field. Bobby Joe’s children grew up wealthy — but some family members ran into trouble with the law. Johnny Football’s larger-than-life story starts to make a little more sense when you learn about his larger-than-life family.

But Deadspin made a bold claim by alleging that two of Johnny Manziel’s relatives might have taken steps to control the family’s oil fortune for themselves. Burke wrote that Manziel’s great-grandmother, Dorothy Manziel, and her son, Nolan, began signing every major business transaction beginning in the 1970s. To Burke, this meant that the family fortune appeared to be “moving away” from other relatives, including Johnny Manziel’s grandfather, Norman Paul.

“When the Manziels bought something, Dorothy and Nolan signed the note,” Burke wrote. “When they sold assets, their names went on the deed. The family fortune, at least outwardly, was moving away from Bobby Joe Jr., Norman Paul, and the other Manziel children.”

Burke offered this example:

On June 21, 1993, Nolan Manziel created the Manziel Family Oil & Gas Partnership Limited. Public records show he’s the sole officer and registered agent. Two months after Nolan created the company, county records show Dorothy Nolan Manziel sold what appears to be the entirety of the family’s oil and gas interests to the partnership. The price? $10.

So according to Deadspin, Johnny Manziel might not be as wealthy as the mainstream sports media believed, and that could explain why Johnny Football would sign autographs for money, as ESPN has alleged. It was classic Deadspin, pointing out a key point that mainstream journalists had missed and that only Deadspin was clever enough to figure out.

But in this case, Deadspin was simply wrong. The Manziel family did many things, some good and some bad, but the evidence doesn’t show that Johnny Manziel’s relatives were hoarding an oil fortune and cutting off the family.

Here are the glaring problems with Deadspin’s story, and why the documents Burke obtained don’t show what he claimed they show:

Not a $10 sale

As many Deadspin readers immediately pointed out, the shockingly low $10 sales price does not necessarily mean Dorothy Manziel sold the family assets to her son’s company for a song, as Deadspin claimed.

Yes, the deed says $10. But it’s important to read the whole sentence and understand its meaning. The full deed says $10 and “and other good and valuable consideration.” The purchase price could range from $10 to a gazillion dollars, or ownership interest in the business. It’s simply boilerplate language printed on all kinds of public records like this one. There’s no way of knowing the purchase price without an insider disclosing it.

“You look at almost every deed that’s filed in the state of Texas and it says $10 and other consideration,” said Richard Leshin, a probate lawyer in Corpus Christi who had helped me understand the family’s court filings for my story about the Manziel estate. “It’s boilerplate.”

Not a corporate takeover

Dorothy Manziel did not sell the entirety of the family’s oil and gas interests, as Deadspin claimed. She only sold her personal oil and gas interests. The deed doesn’t say anything about any other Manziels selling their assets. Huge difference. Other relatives, including Johnny’s grandfather, had their own share of the family fortune.

Wealth didn’t ‘move away’ from family

Dorothy Manziel did not sell the assets to an oil and gas business solely controlled by her son, Nolan, as Deadspin claimed. She was a general partner in that firm and others. Which explains all those signatures by Dorothy and Nolan in all those business transactions that Burke thought were so suspicious.

Dorothy Manziel was a general partner in the family business, which explains why she signed a bunch of business documents. It doesn’t mean she was hoarding wealth from the rest of the family.

In business partnerships, the general partners make day-to-day decisions, and limited partners don’t actively manage things. Limited partners also don’t usually show up in corporate filings in Texas.

Signing a bunch of documents does not necessarily mean Dorothy and Nolan were cutting off the rest of the Manziels from the oil fortune. Burke doesn’t address the very pertinent fact that other members of the Manziel family could be limited partners in the oil and gas business. Burke offered no evidence showing they weren’t. Which is kind of important. And a court record filed in 2001 shows that at least one member of the family was definitely a limited partner: Johnny Manziel’s grandfather, Norman Paul.

What we have here is a business transaction that probably means the exact opposite of what Burke described. Keep in mind Dorothy Manziel was 75 years old at the time. Leshin told me the shift in Dorothy’s assets to the business partnership would cut the amount of federal taxes owed by her estate after her death. The appraisals of business partnerships get a discount applied towards their total worth, which results in a lower tax bill. So shifting assets to the business partnership would actually benefit the entire Manziel family.

There was nothing nefarious about it — yet thousands of Deadspin’s readers got that impression.

I tried to contact Burke but he didn’t respond to my emails, so it’s unclear if he found evidence that wasn’t included in his story. The Manziels also did not return my messages. But Burke’s story upset at least one member of the family, prompting her to speak out about how the family was portrayed.

Burke’s story, while almost brilliant, ended up illustrating the pitfalls of relying too much on the wealth of information that’s available on the Internet. It’s all worthless if we fail to fully understand what it means.

Burke vacuumed up all kinds of public records and old news clips. But there are no indications he actually visited Tyler, the hometown of the Manziel family. Or that he interviewed any friends, relatives, or experts who could help him truly understand what he was reading. Or that he attempted to reach the Manziel family to hear what they had to say. All those steps help fallible journalists get the story right.

Burke’s story about the Manziels also shows the pitfalls for journalists who have blinders on. From the beginning, Burke saw “an emerging media narrative of family riches but no evidence to support those riches,” so he looked into it. Which is fine — but you have to be open to facts that contradict your assumptions. If you’re not careful, that’s how benign business transactions, such as the 1993 sale Burke found, wind up looking downright Machiavellian.

At least Deadspin got the title right to its lengthy, flawed epic.

“The Long Con.”

UPDATE: Deadspin Editor Tommy Craggs, Burke’s boss, emailed me this afternoon with a response and invited me to call him. We had a long back-and-forth — Craggs clearly wasn’t happy, and he claimed I wrote the post out of jealousy. (Not true, plus it’s irrelevant. Either Deadspin’s story is right, or it’s not.)

Many of the points Craggs made in the phone call are the same ones he raised in the email, and he said he wanted the email to speak for itself. At the end of the call, Craggs did say he’d go back and re-read Burke’s story and look at the points I raised. “If there are errors, we’ll fix them,” he said.

Here’s the full text of Craggs’ email:

John: You’re misreading our story, and you wrote a really tendentious post based on that misreading. Part of this is our fault. I wish Burke had talked to you right away, but he (and I) can be a little prickly, and it didn’t help that you were pressing him so incessantly on a comment made by a parody commenter.

The story was not suggesting there was anything “Machiavellian” (by which I think you just mean “crooked”) about the $10, nor was it suggesting that the entirety of the fortune had dwindled to that sum. The point was only to illustrate the close, less-than-arm’s-length nature of a transaction between relatives. And if we read too much significance into the boilerplate itself, it doesn’t change the fact that this *was* a close, less-than-arm’s-length transaction between relatives.

You’re reading a lot more suspicion in our tone than is actually there. We were trying to track the movements of the family’s oil money over the years, based on the mostly opaque public trail left by a series of private business transactions. We weren’t suggesting any sort of nefarious activity. I suppose it’s hard to write about that sort of thing without a sinister air creeping into the prose, but that wasn’t the intent, and I think a good-faith reading of the story would bear that out.

The price was $10 “and other goods and valuable consideration,” which is boilerplate contractual language. Also, according to John Tedesco’s rigorous but generally sententious bird-dogging of our story, Dorothy Manziel sold only her personal share. You can read all of Tedesco’s criticism here. It’s based on a very narrow and ungenerous reading of this story, but he does clear up several details.